A diary entry from me: Working in groups: failures and good lessons learnt - 1 Year To Get To College (Post 14) - Writing Wednesday

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, 

This week has been challenging so far. From Monday, I feel like a lot of things went wrong. This is a natural process, things can go wrong for everyone and we just have to learn to deal with the problems and adapt to them. 

For the past probably month and a bit, I've been struggling my way through my own dance that I came up with in my group and unfortunately, sufficient progress hasn't been made. This was mostly due to our complicated ideas. The theme of our piece was We Live and We Learn and we had to come up with a routine that represented the diversity of people within our local community, under that title. Our original idea was to talk about basically everyone (LGBTQ, different cultures, and the poor) through the mediums of different dance styles. From the beginning, I wasn't really 100% on the overall theme of our ideas; I thought that maybe it could work but everything just seemed a bit cluttered and I thought that there wasn't a style of dance that represented LGBTQ. However, my peers were adamant that this was something they wanted to include in the piece. Equally, what made it more difficult was that when we also tried to organise extra rehearsal time, outside of our dance lessons, many people in my group couldn't do most of the after school and lunch time sessions that we'd planned and no one was really committed enough to sacrifice some of their own time to work on this. Many people were also away during lesson time so we missed out on a good 4 weeks of decent learning time. Before half term arrived, the two people who were in that lesson, thought it was a good idea to talk to our teacher about our ideas because we were a bit stuck and the other groups had moved on already. I think she knew that we were stuck and so she suggested that we just made it more simple by sticking to different cultures. I thought that this would be great because A, I come from a multicultural background, and B, all we had to do was research different styles of dance from different cultures. We agreed in the meeting that our main style of dance, to link everything together, would be hip hop. Consequently, I went into half term choreographing hip hop and some African contemporary. However, when I came back and we did an after school rehearsal session, some people in my group expressed that they thought the different styles of dance from the different cultures would be too difficult to execute so our idea basically changed all over again and what we were rehearsing more of was contemporary, that one member of the group choreographed. The hip hop was now supposed to represent poverty.

Cutting back to what happened on Monday, I basically just cried over my dad's phone to my dance teacher because during that lesson on that day, one person was not even doing any of the dance and hated all of our ideas, and other people in the group needed some prompting to actually work and I felt I needed to let her know what was really going on. Even though I shouldn't, I feel very much responsible for this whole mess because I chose to work with people, who probably went to their interviews, decided that they didn't want to take on dance in the future, and were basically just not bothering. My dance teacher was very kind and she took the time out of her day to speak to me. She's a very loyal teacher and even took me to that theatre college near London, so I felt I could very much put my trust in her. She reassured me that it would all work out in the end. She said that she'll have a meeting with me and the others about our dance and if it doesn't work out next lesson, I'll have to change groups. I think that would be the better option to be honest because I did everything in my power to make this dance work and it hasn't so there's really nothing more to be done. Next time, I'll know not to mix business with pleasure, and work with people who actually want to achieve, instead of the people I just talk to more.

It's not all bad though. I think through all this, everyone in my group learnt how to work co-operatively and that can only help us in the future. Especially with me, since I want to become a choreographer in the future, I'll have to learn to teach people of different types and although I made a lot of mistakes with my GCSE dance piece, I'm happy that I got this lesson early. You won't always work well with everyone and I think that that is what we all learnt from this. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're bad people but it just means that we don't really work well in a group and that's okay. 

Thanks for sticking by on this long,rambling story, you're a real winner!😂 Now time for some comedy to cheer us up! 

Don McMillan

Channel 4

Have you had any terrible incidences where you've had to work in a group? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you! 

Tap one of the reaction boxes below to let me know what you thought of this post. It would really help me to make some improvements in the future! 

Be sure to follow and subscribe so that you don't miss anymore of my brilliant posts and share this article with a friend who might enjoy it too! 

See you next time, 

Bye,

XOX, Juliette

Video links:
Don McMillan
Channel 4

My social media handles:
My Instagram 
My YouTube channel 

My second blog:
The Book Hub